'The Flowers' by Dagoberto Gilb
BOOK REVIEW
The tale of a lost boy in an unnamed city not unlike Los Angeles.
IN his varied career, Dagoberto Gilb has given voice to the marginalized and advocated for a more accurate and ample Chicano literary history. Currently a professor in the creative writing program at Texas State University, he is the editor of the weighty "Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature" (2006). His own work first came to national attention in 1993, when his short-story collection "The Magic of Blood" was published to great acclaim and went on to win the PEN/Hemingway Award. Gilb's bleak first novel, "The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña" (1994), set in the Southwest, was a New York Times Notable Book.
In Europe, Gilb's work is considered a lens on multicultural America. His essay collection, "Gritos," (2003), written over a period of 20 years, includes an unforgettable piece titled "Mi Mommy," first published in the New Yorker as "I Knew She Was Beautiful," in which Gilb describes a reunion with his once movie star-gorgeous mother on her deathbed.
The gut-wrenching essay presages Gilb's second novel, "The Flowers," the tale of a lost boy in an unnamed city not unlike Los Angeles.
Sonny Bravo tells his own story. The 15-year-old Chicano's mastery of Spanish is limited, but his Spanglish sizzles. To imagine the adult he wants to become, he teaches himself French. It's not tainted by the prejudices that abound close to home. Gilb juxtaposes lean, hard-boiled prose with more lyrical passages seeking to pin down ephemeral adolescent emotions. Sonny likes to close his eyes and see with his ears. His mother's telephone conversations tend to be about men and betrayal: "So I tried to never listen. I made it go black inside my head, and then words, when she'd make them, were these shapes that wormed around, spraying light that would disappear into a hole that was bigger than any room I been in."
Not since James M. Cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice" has the unspoken so crackled with sexual tension. Lyrical passages don't always ring as true, but Gilb's dialogue, working class and downbeat, is inspired. When Sonny and his contemporaries converse in combo -- Spanish and English as one -- poetry emerges.
